Elias Vyatlin

Holy Venerable Martyr Elias Vyatlin, a hieromonk, was born on 24 February 1867 in the village of Karinskoe, in the Alexandrov district of the Vladimir province, in the family of the peasant Ivan Vyatlin, who raised his son in faith and piety. When he came of age he married, and in 1892 a son, Pavel, was born to them. Elias Ivanovich worked for a long time as a weaver at a textile factory in Alexandrov and served in the church. When his son had grown up, his wife died. In 1920 he entered the Lukianov hermitage of the Nativity of the Mother of God, twelve kilometres from Alexandrov, where he was tonsured a monk. For him salvation, prayer and faith came before everything, and it seemed not to matter to him that the revolution had begun and the persecution of the Church with it.

In 1932 the monastic community was destroyed by the godless authorities. The monk Elias was ordained hieromonk and served at one of the churches in Alexandrov. In the summer of 1937 the churches in the town were closed and the priests arrested. Father Elias was not arrested then, probably because the NKVD thought him too old. On 27 June 1937 he settled in the village of Yeremeevo, in the Istra district of the Moscow region, and served at the church of the Ascension of the Lord. The wave of arrests did not pass over this village either.

On 12 February 1938 the village council gave the NKVD a certificate saying that the priest Elias Vyatlin was by social position an alien man, distrusted Soviet power and, during services, drew some kolkhoz women away from their work on the collective farm. On 16 and 20 February the villagers were questioned, among them the host in whose house the priest lived, but they could say nothing incriminating, since they knew him little, he having lived there less than a year. On 20 February the local NKVD operative sent a report asking for his arrest. On 25 February the arrest certificate was drawn up, quoting the priest as saying that Soviet power had driven all the peasants into the collective farms and tormented them, and had throttled the priests altogether, and that here the Bolsheviks did not take them, but where he had served before they had taken everyone.

On 28 February 1938 he was arrested, and on 1 March he was interrogated. The investigator asked what had made him become a monk in 1920 and then a priest. The father answered: his religious convictions and the fact that he was already fifty. He was told that he had said that the fascists would defeat Spain and then deal with the Bolsheviks, and that the peasants went less to church because of Bolshevik agitation. He answered that, being a man firm in faith, he did not like the policy of Soviet power, which agitated against religion, and that he had indeed told his parishioners that Soviet power had throttled religion and the priests and that the peasants in the collective farms were tormented and kept from believing in God. About the fascists, he said that he had never spoken and did not even understand who they were.

After the interrogation, awaiting sentence, he was held in prison at Volokolamsk. On 2 March the NKVD troika condemned him to death, and he was taken to the Taganka prison in Moscow. Hieromonk Elias Vyatlin was shot on 5 April 1938 and buried in an unknown common grave at the Butovo firing range. The Church commemorates him on 5 April, the day of his death, in the new style, and also on 6 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Vladimir, and on the movable days of the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo and of the Saints of Moscow.